There’s no indication that the murder occurred or that the murderer was an undercover, so it may have been a scam by the purported murderer. The presence of the murder scheme in the New York complaint is entirely gratuitous to support holding Ulbricht without bail and make him look menacing, even though it may actually signify that a purported criminal mastermind was duped by fake murderers in two separate countries. Federal criminal justice is like that.

I think the federal guilty plea rate is in the 90-95% range, with the remainder being trials and the occasional dismissal or other resolution.

How bad is that? This is really, really bad, because this means the forces that may shape and influence laws are not applying. How will we know how facts are proven in court if the court is not hearing them?

Also on Aaron Swartz:

Third part: As a defense attorney, what’s frustrating is seeing so many smart people devoted to the idea that Swartz was singled out for unusually harsh or unfair treatment. He wasn’t. People get treated just as badly, or worse, by the federal system all the time with zero attention. And the federal system is like the motherfucking Ritz Carlton compared to the state system.

As some of you may remember, in January 2011 Puerto 80 S.L.U. got seized its domains rojadirecta.com and rojadirecta.org.

Yesterday August 29th, The Honorable Paul A. Crotty, District Judge at the Southern District of New York, ordered the warrants of seizure to be vacated and the domains returned.

Previously, the same day, the District Attorney Preet Bharara submitted a letter to advise the Court that “…as a result of certain recent judicial authority involving issues germane to the above-captioned action, and in light of the particular circumstances of this litigation, the Government now seeks to dismiss its amended forfeiture complaint.”

The court concluded that that the plaintiff was not likely to succeed on its claim that the “myVidster” website was liable for direct or contributory copyright infringement by hosting and embedding links to infringing copies of the plaintiff’s videos, which were not hosted by myVidster.

The Flava Works opinion supports the position that the seized domain names are neither committing, enabling or assisting infringement by engaging in the conduct alleged by the government in the Amended Complaint. The Seventh Circuit explained that because watching a streaming video is not infringement (any more than sneaking into a theater and watching a copyrighted movie is infringement), providing a link to where a streaming video is hosted does not encourage or assist infringement.

This assertion, however, went against something Bressler said earlier in testimony, which Samsung’s attorney Charles Verhoeven was quick to catch and point out to jurors: Bressler previously said that each and every detail is important in evaluating patents. Verhoeven continued to grill Bressler about the specific details of the Vibrant and other Samsung phones’ designs.

“You’re asking me to compare peanut butter to turkey,” Bressler told Verhoeven as he grew frustrated with the latter’s questions. Your guess is as good as ours as to whether Apple’s phones or Samsung’s are the peanut butter, or the turkey.

“We didn’t think they [Google] were doing anything wrong,” Schwartz affirmed. He also attested that at no time during his tenure did Sun “consider APIs proprietary or protected”. An Oracle attorney asked Schwartz if he had been fired by Oracle when the deal was completed in 2010. Ever quick on his feet, Schwartz replied that “They already had a CEO”.

But this time, the company that received the request pushed back. It told the agency that it wanted to tell its customer that he or she was being targeted, which would give the customer a chance to fight the request in court, as a group of Twitter users did last year when the Justice Department sought their records under a different kind of request. The minor defiance in this latest case was enough to land the NSL request in a federal court docket last Friday, where the government filed a request for a court order to force the company to adhere to the gag order.

In its petition, the government asserted that disclosure of the fact or contents of its NSL “may endanger the national security of the United States” and urged the court to issue an order binding the company to the nondisclosure provision, or be in violation of federal law and face contempt charges.”

To some extent we all have the impression that the scientific method makes things move forward based on a set of principles and when one thinks on science, peer reviewed publications and credibility, the concept of reproducibility stands tall.

Making available all the components of a scientific experiment may be a complex task, but guarantees that the community can fully validate the produced results.

In this article from Nature the authors make a reflection on the impact of code un-disclosure when it comes to science.

Much of the debate about code transparency involves the philosophy of science, error validation and research ethics, but our contention is more practical: that the cause of reproducibility is best furthered by focusing on the dissection and understanding of code, a sentiment already appreciated by the growing open-source movement.

Forensic activity cannot fully match to science practice. Of course we can talk about “forensic sciences” as the body of knowledge related to our activities, but we forensic experts (most often) work over concrete instances, not general or abstract matters. But the concept of reproducibility is key to provide support for the basic principles of due process, especially for the impact it may have on the principle of contradiction.

From the forensic perspective we should think about the implications of code un-disclosure in the rights of people.